Of all the sciences in Husserl’s time, descriptive psychology was the
closest to Husserl’s phenomenology: Husserl attended Brentano’s lecture on psychology and aesthetics in 1885/86, where Brentano introduced for the first time the distinction not only between two aspects of psychological research but also between two branches of psychology: genetic and descriptive psychology. Husserl also collected Brentano’s manuscripts on this subject, and he considered descriptive psychology and phenomenology synonymous in the first edition of his Logical Investigations (1900-01). Later, however, Husserl departs from this point of view, repeatedly underlining that phenomenology is not the same as descriptive psychology, since the former brackets any reference to personal mental life. The main contention of my paper is that we need to answer the following questions in order to properly assess the role and significance of Brentano’s descriptive psychology in building Husserl's phenomenology:
1.What is the relationship between Brentano’s Psychology from an empirical standpoint (PES) and his Descriptive Psychology (DP)? Are they one and the same psychology or do they need to be distinguished based on their different aims and traits: (a) PES works with Mill’s inductive-deductive model of science and it is not a mereology, as DP is; (b) PES does not acknowledge and hence does not operate with, the central methodological step of noticing (Bemerken), as DP does; and (c) PES works with three fundamental classes of psychical phenomena (presentations, judgments and emotional phenomena), and the criterion of their classification is the type of their intentional relation to the object. By contrast, DP does not operate with this criterion but with the criterion of the separability of phenomena.
2.What is the scientific status of DP? Is it a pure a priori science or is it both an a priori and an empirical-inductive science? What is the role of experience and what does "noticing" mean in DP? How many types of induction does DP work with, and what is the significance of conceptual analysis in the DP?